The role of the bookbinder in the production of saleable books and the significance of the binding in all its details, both structural and decorative, have often been disregarded or marginalised by bibliographers. In this book Dr Mirjam Foot sets out to reverse the trend; by establishing working binders, and their materials and tools as an essential part of the production cycle she reveals the inadequacy of bibliographical descriptions that lack essential binding information. Dr Foot has based her analysis of the role of the binder (which entails 153 tasks, according to one German authority) on a number of primary sources, manuals and descriptions of bookbinding practice of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mainly from France, Germany, the Netherlands and Britain. She draws on these manuals, as well as on actual examples of bound books, for her many illustrations. The result is a lucid and very detailed description of binding practice which will be invaluable to bookbinders, bibliographers, antiquarian booksellers and historians.
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